Catcher on the Roof

I taught my gardening class today at Lily's school, and about halfway through, as per usual, we went up on the roof so the kids could run around. It was cold, and they quickly invented some kind of a faux ice-skating game that involved plunging headfirst down one of the slides and then sprinting over to a "skate shop" over by a chair, so I stood with my back against a wall and watched them. To my horror, I realized after a few minutes that a few of the kids were deliberately excluding another one, pretending not to hear this child, dismissing this child's ideas and otherwise ensuring that this child remained clearly on the outskirts of the goings-on. 

I'm not sure why I was so horrified. I was a child. I went to school. I remember how mean children can be to each other; I remember the times somebody was mean to me, and the (blessedly few) times I was mean to somebody else, and how it felt afterward, how it still feels now to remember. But seeing it from this perspective, as the parent of a child existing in a little closed circle in which this was happening, although she was neither the perpetrator nor the victim, felt different. To be honest, it made me feel a little bit sick.

I stopped it. I took one of the offenders by the hand and told the child in no uncertain terms that if everyone was not able to, encouraged to participate, then the game would end, that we would immediately descend from the roof. I am not my mother's daughter for nothing; I saw recognition in this child's eyes. I was not messing around. But the truth is that the child who was being shut out will be shut out again, probably tomorrow, and the children shutting out this child will shut out somebody else, probably tomorrow, and what I really wanted to do up there on the roof as I stood with my back against the brick wall watching, remembering, was take the offending children by the shoulders and crouch down to their level and look them straight in the eyes. I wanted to say, to shout, STOP! I wanted to tell them that making somebody else feel small never makes you feel bigger, that every time you are cruel to someone else it chips away a little piece of who you are, that mean people are loved less, love less, and hurt more, that being kind, truly kind and generous to others, especially those you don't love or don't need or don't understand is the best way to give your life purpose and meaning, to mean something more than what you actually are. 

But I didn't, of course. I just stopped it, in the moment, and went back to watching, but a little less cheerfully, a little more warily. I cannot protect my children from this. But I can do all I can to make sure they know which side they want to be on when the meanness starts. From this point on, it will be a central part of my parenting. I wish it didn't have to happen so soon.